Panthers Coach Dave Canales Lived ‘Secret Life,’ Admitted to Cheating on Wife

Carolina Panthers head coach Dave Canales has been candid about the mistakes of his past — even putting them down on paper for the world to dissect.

Dave, 44, and his wife, Lizzy Canales, coauthored a book titled “This Marriage? The Question That Changed Everything,” published in 2022. 

“I was living a secret life,” Dave wrote, admitting that he would often lie about his marital status when out in public. 

“I would be out with my friends and take my ring off, acting like I was single depending on who was around,” Dave continued. “This didn’t happen all the time, but I left a crack in the door for deceit.”

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Dave was also candid about his history of infidelity, which he said started shortly before the couple walked down the aisle in 2006. 

“I cheated on Lizzy for the first time at my bachelor party one month before we got married,” he wrote. “From the start of our relationship, I was binge drinking and going out with my friends, without Lizzy. Before I was ever unfaithful to her, I was already there in my mind. Bad habits combined with addiction made it hard for me to resist temptation.”

Dave added, “No matter how hard I tried by going to church, reading my Bible and praying. I always had a secret, dark place that was just mine.”

The football coach confessed to his wife at a marriage conference. Lizzy recalled asking Dave a specific question about his infidelity. 

“I have something hard to ask you,” she wrote in the book. “Was any of your sexual activity unprotected?”

“Yes,” Dave remembered answering. “Lizzy, I am so sorry.”

After confessing, Dave and Lizzy both took STD tests, which both came back negative. Shortly after, Lizzy found out she was pregnant. (Dave and Lizzy share four children: Ashby, Ben, Bea and Amaya.)

Lizzy wanted specifics about Dave’s cheating, including the women he slept with. 

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“She nailed every event,” he said. “I told her what happened and with whom. Some of the women I was involved with were close to home and some far away. I told her the darkest and ugliest secrets of my life — some so dark I don’t want a single other person to know.”

Dave added, “Lizzy called out our broken marriage and I made some pretty dark confessions,” Dave wrote. “I needed to stop pursuing sex outside of my marriage and I needed to stop drinking as much as I was. … A huge part in the severed intimacy that I was experiencing with Lizzy was because I was addicted to pornography. It was like a gateway drug for me, creating pathways in my brain that allowed me to use sex coldly for my own benefit.”

The couple decided to get brutally honest about their relationship in the hopes of helping other relationships in similar peril. 

“We had to really think about how exposed we would be as a couple who already existed in a very public profession,” Dave wrote in the book’s preface. “Sharing our scars meant being willing to tell people the truth of how our marriage failed.”